Website is right about crime numbers but is wrong in its conclusion

Friday

Jan 18, 2013 at 12:01 AM

The advertising tagline from the 1981 movie “Absence of Malice” noted that a story can be accurate but not true. The same can be said for NeighborhoodScout.com’s assertion that Spartanburg is the 12th most dangerous city in the nation.

The advertising tagline from the 1981 movie “Absence of Malice” noted that a story can be accurate but not true. The same can be said for NeighborhoodScout.com’s assertion that Spartanburg is the 12th most dangerous city in the nation.There were 658 violent crimes in Spartanburg in 2011, according to FBI data.The city’s official population that year was 37,334.So technically, NeighborhoodScout.com is accurate when it says that the city had a ratio of 17.63 violent crimes per 1,000 residents.But it is not true that this makes Spartanburg the 12th most dangerous city in the nation. Does anyone really believe Spartanburg is more dangerous than Atlanta, Chicago and Philadelphia?The numbers are accurate but the conclusion is not true because NeighborhoodScout.com conducts an overwhelmingly superficial analysis to come to its conclusions.This superficial analysis is particularly inadequate to understand the real picture of crime in Spartanburg.The problem is that the city limits of Spartanburg do not encompass the entire city. Metropolitan Spartanburg spreads well beyond the city limits. Because South Carolina has very strict annexation laws, and because the city gave away its ability to use its utility service to force annexation, the city has not been able to expand its limits as the urban area of the city grew.So the city limits don’t encompass the whole city. In reality, they comprise the inner core of a much larger city. Most of the crime in any city takes place in its inner-city core.What that means is that NeighborhoodScout.com is looking at most of the crime that happens in the city, but it is dividing that crime by the population of only the inner core of what is really a much larger city. The result is that its figures make the city look much worse than it is.

The website’s analysis is accurate but untrue.If the website used the true urban population of the city rather than the population that lives only within the city limits, the figures would be much lower, and Spartanburg’s ranking among dangerous cities would be much lower.It is unfortunate for the city that NeighborhoodScout.com puts forth such a superficial view of crime and posts it as if it were a valid measure that its viewers should consider if they are considering moving to Spartanburg.City officials have been understandably frustrated by the website. It’s very hard to combat statistics that are accurate but not true.